The present invention relates to fully automatic method and apparatus for assembling stick-type cosmetics, and more particularly relates to a system which carries out assemblage of stick-type cosmetics such as lipsticks in a fully automatic fashion.
Although the present invention is well applicable to all sorts of stick-type cosmetics, the following description is mainly focussed on application to lipsticks for conveniency purposes.
A lipstick is in general made up of a stick, a bottle and a cap which have to be assembled together for production. Assemblage of a lipstick is conventionally carried out by manual operations. In the manual production, colour-adjusted material paste is charged into stick holes of a split mould, sticks are taken out of the split mould after solidification by cooling, each stick is inserted into a bottle at the tail end, the stick is subjected to flaming in order to remove surface finger prints and/or crests formed by moulding and a cap is inserted over the bottle after withdrawal of the stick into the bottle.
Such a conventional manual assemblage requires a great deal of manual labour and redundant operations such as flaming. In addition, it is not preferable from a sanitarian point of view that, during production, operator's hand touches lipsticks which are brought into direct contact with user's lips at usage. Further, since the work is usually done by female operators in order to save labour cost, lipsticks are liable to be contaminated by powdery cosmetics and/or dandruff of the operators.
In order to avoid such troubles caused by manual handling in the assemblage, a rotary capsule type lipstick moulding machine has already been proposed. This moulding machine includes a great number of capsules which are arranged upright along the periphery of a round rotary table. Material paste is charged into the capsules during rotation of the table and, after solidification by cooling, lipsticks are discharged from the capsules by application of compressed air. No crests are developed on the surface of the lipsticks and moulding operation is automatized for effective reduction in manual labor. Continuous charge of the material paste appreciably streamlines the process.
Incidently, production of lipsticks faces a wide variety of quality demands. Point of sales of a lipstick is usually put on its configuration, in particular the shape of the tip. So, the production must be flexible enough to supply lipsticks of various configurations. The life cycle of a type of lipsticks is in general very short. Frequent change in type is caused by fashion factors, seasonal factors and geographical factors, and such change in type in most cases accompany corresponding change in stick configuration. Thus, production of lipsticks usually takes the form of a small scale production with high lot number. In other words, lipstick production is unsuited for any mass production system.
When appreciated from this point of view, the above-described automatic moulding machine needs to keep a wide variety of capsule groups, each group including a great number of capsules. A great deal of labour is needed for shifting from one lot to another lot while handling vast number of capsules. Separate control and separate storage of capsules also requires a great deal of attention and labour. For these reasons, the proposed automatic moulding machine is quite unsuited for the small scale production with high lot number which is unavoidably required for production of lipsticks.